Autonomous Driving

Dr. Asaro is Associate Professor in the School of Media Studies at the New School in New York City. He is the co-founder of the International Committee for Robot Arms Control, and has written on lethal robotics from the perspective of just war theory and human rights. Dr. Asaro's research also examines agency and autonomy, liability and punishment, and privacy and surveillance as it applies to consumer robots, industrial automation, smart buildings, aerial drones and autonomous vehicles.

Ryan Calo is an assistant professor at the University of Washington School of Law and a former research director at CIS. A nationally recognized expert in law and emerging technology, Ryan's work has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, NPR, Wired Magazine, and other news outlets. Ryan serves on several advisory committees, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, and the Future of Privacy Forum.

Some ninety percent of motor vehicle crashes are caused at least in part by human error. This intuitive claim is a fine place to start discussions about the safety potential of vehicle automation. (It is not an appropriate place to end these discussions.

Thank you for reading my posts this week. If you happen to be Eugene Volokh or Ken Anderson, thank you in particular for making them possible. And if you were one of my thoughtful commenters, thank you for questioning and challenging; I have read your remarks with great interest.

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Abstract

This Article focuses on one cyberphysical domain — automated driving — to methodically analyze the so-called liability problem. It considers how automated driving could affect product liability, how product liability could affect automated driving, and how each could advance or impede the prevention of injury and the compensation of victims.

At the outset, it's not clear to me what Silicon Valley is and isn't — or why that matters. Companies like Google are often contrasted with companies like General Motors, and yet, according to an automotive industry group, automakers spend over $100 billion every year on research and development worldwide. R&D is a form of tech innovation. Energy companies, pharmaceutical firms and financial institutions are also technological powerhouses. Innovation is central to telecommunications, defense and health care.

So you've decided that your state should have self-driving cars. How, then, do you catch the attention of the Googles, Volvos and Navyas of the world that are developing and even deploying these vehicles?

This report examines various emerging regulatory issues surrounding the deployment of automated and autonomous vehicles. This work was based on the expert opinion of the authors and serves as a think piece regarding the nature, timing and scope of regulatory action regarding automated and, ultimately, selfdriving vehicles.

Suppose that an autonomous car is faced with a terrible decision to crash into one of two objects. It could swerve to the left and hit a Volvo sport utility vehicle (SUV), or it could swerve to the right and hit a Mini Cooper. If you were programming the car to minimize harm to others–a sensible goal–which way would you instruct it go in this scenario?

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"As Bryant Walker Smith, assistant professor at University of South Carolina puts it, “we focus on what’s really sexy, like self-driving cars. And we forget about all of the supporting technologies that could be really important.”"

""Those deployments will start small but grow fast," said Bryant Walker Smith, a specialist in autonomous vehicle regulation at the University of South Carolina School of Law. Already, Waymo plans to deploy a robot-car ride-hailing service in the Phoenix area later this year."

“We will continue to see a mix of approaches in other states. Many are likely to have far less regulation than California,” said Bryant Walker Smith, assistant professor at the University of South Carolina’s law school, who writes regularly about autonomous driving."

"“There were lots of overlaps and informal sharing and all kinds of personalities early on,” says Bryant Walker Smith, a law professor at Stanford who specializes in automated driving technology. The Uber–Waymo case can be seen, he says, as “tidying up loose ends dealing with the remnant messiness from the beginning,” said Smith. Still, just because the case is settled doesn’t mean the road that lies ahead for automated driving is any less rocky."

"“Aviation suggests the way forward,” says autonomy researcher Bryant Walker Smith, an assistant professor in the School of Law and the School of Engineering at the University of South Carolina. “Both regulators and manufacturers will investigate, and crashes will be examined more systematically. Investigations will increasingly turn to digital data stored locally or remotely, whether from the vehicles involved, other vehicles, personal devices, or surrounding infrastructure.

"Companies operating autonomous vehicles are likely to settle quickly in crash-related lawsuits when the technology appears to be at fault, and fight mightily when they believe the driver of the ordinary vehicle to be responsible, said Stanford researcher and University of South Carolina School of Law professor Bryant Walker Smith.

“There might be data that might tend to show fault or no fault,” Smith said."

"Without federal help, however, the upfront cost of connected infrastructure can be prohibitive for small towns and cities. Bryant Walker Smith, a law professor at the University of South Carolina and an affiliate scholar at Stanford’s Center for Internet and Society, recently challenged a group of students to come up with ways to secure public funding for vehicle-to-infrastructure technology that would enable more governments to afford it.

"As an internationally recognized expert on the law of self-driving vehicles, Bryant Walker Smith is frequently asked to weigh in on legal issues related to automated driving. But the UofSC law professor’s expertise isn’t limited to cars and the people not driving them. His insights into tort law and product liability, and his broader interest in what he terms “the law of the newly possible,” are helping prepare USC law students for an evolving legal landscape.

"On the other hand, stringing together seven trucks would represent “some advanced platooning,” said Bryant Walker Smith, an assistant law professor at the University of South Carolina who focuses on autonomous driving, in an e-mail. That number is well beyond the two or three that most platoon developers are initially aiming for, and more than any single carrier usually has traveling together at the same time, he added."

"Congress may finally be hacking away at national legislation that would firmly delineate who is responsible for regulating what about autonomous cars, but California has a big role to play here. “California is special,” says Bryant Walker Smith, a legal scholar with the University of South Carolina School of Law who studies self-driving vehicles.

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In 2013, Elon Musk proposed an "open source transportation concept" of levitating vehicles zooming passengers through vacuum tubes at 760 miles an hour. It would be weatherproof, energy-efficient, relatively inexpensive, have autonomous controls. Its impact on urban and inter-city transport could reshape economies and families.

Attendees will hear leading speakers, participate in interactive breakout sessions, and network with key innovators in this exciting field. Don't miss what's in store for the Automated Vehicles Symposium 2016.

The Federal Trade Commission held a one-day public workshop on January 19, 2016, 9 am - 5:30 pm, to explore competition and related issues in the context of state regulation of motor vehicle distribution, and to promote more informed analysis of how these regulations affect businesses and consumers.

The University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute and Toyota invite you to attend "Leadership in Transportation: New Perspectives on Safe and Sustainable Transportation," a series of informative and engaging conversations with leaders in transportation.

The Georgetown Law Journal invites everyone for a fast-paced and interesting discussion of "disruptive technology": What are the implications of 3-D printing for patent doctrine? How will the driverless cars of the not-so-distant future affect the way we look at tort liability? What does the Fourth Amendment have to say about mass surveillance programs?

TransOvation is a PDH-granting workshop and program focused on helping transportation design and construction industry professionals (from both the public and private sectors) build innovative thinking into their professional skill set. During this extraordinary, interactive learning event, world-class innovators use real-world examples and technologies to demonstrate approaches that can lead to new markets, increased efficiency, productivity and profit.

If the world’s steadily expanding cities are to thrive in the 21st century, how will we meet the challenges posed by global warming and the growing need for improved infrastructure, transportation, fresh food, water and clean air?

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In 2013, Elon Musk proposed an "open source transportation concept" of levitating vehicles zooming passengers through vacuum tubes at 760 miles an hour. It would be weatherproof, energy-efficient, relatively inexpensive, have autonomous controls. Its impact on urban and inter-city transport could reshape economies and families.

The ABA Annual Conference may not have been a lot of fun for, say, an institution on the cusp of a DOE smackdown, but as a member of the press — marked with a bright yellow badge in case (and the “yellow journalism” epithet did not go unnoticed) — it’s a pretty good time. With my friends from the LegalTalk Network, producers of Thinking Like A Lawyer, I had the opportunity to chat with experts as they finished their panel discussions.

This week, General Motors announced that it would pour $500 million into the ride-sharing service Lyft, with an aim of eventually producing a fleet of self-driving cars. And the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas was filled with autonomous vehicle tech tidbits from companies such as Toyota and Nvidia. But what might a future in which all cars can drive themselves do to our cities, towns, and society? Industry observers say that while it’s clear that there will be robotic cars, it’s much less clear how people will choose to use them.

Self-driving cars are already cruising the streets today. And while these cars will ultimately be safer and cleaner than their manual counterparts, they can’t completely avoid accidents altogether. How should the car be programmed if it encounters an unavoidable accident? Patrick Lin navigates the murky ethics of self-driving cars.

Hear about the current state of the driverless vehicle industry from experts including IEEE Member Jeffrey Miller, IEEE Fellow Wei-Bin Zhang, Bernard Soriano, and Bryant Walker Smith. In addition to present-day commentary, the panelists explored the future of the industry as it relates to technology, policy and ethics. The roundtable discussion, which was broadcast live on August 28, was moderated by Justin Pritchard of the Associated Press.

Self-driving cars – long the dream of science fiction, are closer to reality than you might think. In fact they’ve already traveled more than one million miles along public highways and bi-ways. Still, there are challenges down the road for the self-driving car, including technical, legal, and psychological, as people take their hands off wheel.

"CCTV America’s Michelle Makori interviewed Bryant Walker Smith, assistant professor in the School of Law and School of Engineering at the University of South Carolina, about how self-driving cars can change the way people travel."

“You can look forward to automation as a similar set of local and national tensions and developments and opportunities,” said Bryant Walker Smith. Smith was comparing the early days of broadband and its organic development to what we are seeing with vehicle automation. He brings a unique perspective on this topic, with both a transportation engineering and legal background. Read more at: http://viodi.com/2014/08/15/autonomous-autos-and-the-law/